Whatever you do for work, in your spare time, or generally in life, I’m willing to bet that you probably feel like you should be doing a little bit more.
As a freelancer, I’ve increasingly noticed how I’m pushing myself to just do a little more work; to just spend a bit of extra time hunting for new projects; to just write that blog for myself that I’ve been meaning to do for ages.
And when I don’t do those extra bits, I feel guilty. Sometimes I even get angry with myself. Not just over work-related things either. If I skip my morning yoga practice I feel like I’m failing in some way. If I don’t use my free time productively, I feel as though it’s wasted (even though sometimes we all need to curl up with a book or movie and some chocolate and not move for a few hours).
Since the start of this year, I’ve realised how silly this is and how much I’m doing it to myself. At the beginning of January, I told myself my aim for this year was to post one blog a month in 2019. 12 blogs in total. Simple. Except January came and went, and this is now my first post of the year.
I was feeling annoyed at myself for failing so early in the year. And then I stopped and started to think about why I felt like I’d failed. Did it really matter if I wrote two posts in February? Probably not.
Writing a blog for myself has been on my to-do list for the last three weeks, always getting overlooked in favour of something else; usually work I’m getting paid for. I realised I was making things more difficult for myself.
I’ve been beating myself up about not writing anything for well over a week. Part of the problem was that I didn’t know what I wanted to write about this month. I’ve actually started and abandoned two other posts. But as soon as I stopped being angry that I hadn’t done it and just accepted where I was, I had an idea. And now I’m writing.
One of my yoga teachers is always saying that we’re often our harshest critics. She’s absolutely right. I know I am. It feels as though there’s always something else I should or could be doing, but sometimes, what I should be doing is nothing.
Last year I made a conscious effort to be more present – take a look at my blog about it if you’re interested. This year I’m going to give myself a break. I’m going to try really hard to be content with what I’m achieving and to allow myself a bit more downtime.
That’s not to say I’m going to lose all motivation and stop trying to improve personally and professionally. But I’m hoping that if I give myself a bit more time off and am a little kinder to myself that the motivation for self improvement will come more easily.
We’ll see how it goes. For now I’m just pleased that I’ve written a blog and published it.
